There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30Mb Zune players globally

I thought they'd still yet to launch outside the USA and Canada? And let's be honest, it's not exactly the sort of device you'd bother importing — second rate MP3 players are available globally. I'm definitely a "dump the hardware, incorporate the software into the smartphone platform" advocate...

EDIT: incidentally, what is considered the market leading MP3 player at the minute? I love the games and browser on my iPod Touch, but I did buy it purely for the development opportunities and I rate it very poorly as an MP3 player for the simple reason that it's impossible to control the playback without looking at the screen, with the effect that you can't skip tracks/etc without taking the thing out of your pocket and staring intently at it, which I find to be a major design flaw. I have the 1st generation device (that being what was in the Apple refurbished store), so I don't even have physical volume buttons.

The Zune definitely didn't come out in 2001. That's when the iPod first came out, and the desktop OS rules of "Apple consolidates existing ideas into a best-in-class user interface, subsequently Microsoft do the same thing but worse, Apple put a whole bunch of people off with some notable mistakes and their stink of arrogance" seem to have applied without Microsoft being competitive on price.

And is there any truth (or value) to the reports that the Zune is date obsessed (ie, enough to not allow the user to set the time or date and to run its calculation as a blocking event immediately upon boot) as a side effect of its time limited DRM?

The BBC have gone with the headline "Microsoft Zune affected by 'bug'". So maybe 2008 was the year that, per the BBC, the software meaning of bug stopped being recognised by mainstream society?

EDIT: I'm confident it's not some idiotic sub-editor who doesn't know the difference between single and double quotes, as the opening paragraph states crippled software as a fact, not an attributed charge.

The BBC have gone with the headline "Microsoft Zune affected by 'bug'". So maybe 2008 was the year that, per the BBC, the software meaning of bug stopped being recognised by mainstream society?

What? Mainstream society doesn't really know what a software bug is... They just know the software doesn't work the way it's supposed to... Maybe I don't get what you're saying because I haven't checked yet what the Zune's problem is...?

I think they do, at least to the extent that single quotes in a heading like that just look like someone meant to use double quotes and messed up.

The Zune's problem is that someone who is scared about number theory wrote an extremely odd division routine that simply doesn't work on day 366 of a leap year. All the Zunes should be back to normal by now (especially as the relevant routine allegedly runs in GMT irrespective of the user's timezone), though they'll need a power cycle.

They could have just used three variables instead of a single one. Memory should not be a problem nowadays.

I think possibly that code grabs the value from the RTC and decodes it into three variables. As inspection of the code reveals, on day 366 of a leap year it loops infinitely, making a device appear completely broken since this code is performed immediately after power-on and no other code may run until it is complete.

I don't think it would, since it would surely only ever give 1980 or 1981? Also, whether it's a leap year is a tiny bit more complicated than just every four years — though I expect you've noticed that it isn't actually any more complicated than that over the expected lifespan of a Zune?